Water is stored in large rectangular metal tanks on many drilling sites. Of the 15 instances of drilling impacting a local water supply examined by state auditors, in all 15 the company responsible repaired or replaced the water supply.
(DONALD GILLILAND | dgilliland@pennlive.com)

There's a long tradition in Pennsylvania of audits being vehicles for the political ambition of the Auditor General, and Eugene DePasquale's promised investigation of the Department of Environmental Protection's oversight of Marcellus Shale drilling is no exception.

The audit DePasquale released on Tuesday morning purports to be of "DEP's performance in monitoring potential impacts to water quality from shale gas development," but is in fact something a bit different.

The majority of the audits findings in fact criticize DEP's responsiveness and transparency, specifically the data it makes available on its website.

Only one of the audit's eight findings related to water. Of the 15 confirmed instances of drilling impacting a local water supply examined by the auditors, only one resulted in an administrative order requiring the drilling company to restore or replace the water supply. In the other 14, the companies restored or replaced the water supply without DEP having to issue an order.

"We are not comfortable with that," said DePasquale, who recommended - and suggested that the law requires - an order be issued every single time a water source is impacted. The law, however, says orders shall be issued when "necessary to ensure compliance," and DEP said in 14 instances, companies complied without an order.

DePasquale said he believes the agency should issue orders for every incident because "we want to have a track record of these owners on paper." DEP noted that it issues notices of violation which constitute a paper record., but are different than an administrative order.

DEP also noted that in each of the 15 cases examined by DePasquale, the affected water source was in fact restored or replaced.

The audit also claims that DEP "could not provide reliable assurance that all active shale gas wells were inspected" in a timely manner, but DePasquale stopped short of saying DEP in fact failed to inspect wells - that's because his auditing team did not in fact look at all the records.

DePasquale's team attempted to glean information on the timeliness of inspections from electronic records on the DEP website, which DEP admitted were not adequate to confirm what the auditors were looking for. The information on whether or not wells were in fact inspected in a timely manner are paper records, not electronic.

DePasquale's report criticizes DEP for requiring a "manual review" of paper records to glean such information and does not indicate the auditors in fact looked at the paper records.

When asked if his auditors were incapable of auditing paper records, DePasquale responded that they in fact conducted a statistical sampling of the paper records. But his audit doesn't report the results, and when DePasquale attempted to address them he started talking about response times to citizen complaints rather than well inspections.

In its official response, DEP claimed DePasquale's team "declined to review the hard-copy files for the sample wells."

Confronted with this fact, DePasquale deferred to an assistant, who claimed the auditors did attempt to check hard-copy inspection reports at one DEP field office, but she said "7 percent of the files could not be found."

What of the other 93 percent?

For those, she said, the inspections did occur - but she claimed auditors saw "error rates" on cases such that "it didn't make sense" to investigate further.

So no actual audit of hard-copy paper records occurred; thus, the audit does not say DEP failed to inspect drilling sites in a timely manner - it says one cannot tell that from the electronic data.

There's a big difference.

DEP Secretary Chris Abruzzo noted after DePasquale's press conference that the agency has "volunteered to have our Oil and Gas program audited numerous times in the past by a nonprofit, multi-stakeholder organization called State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations, Inc. (STRONGER). The most recent STRONGER audit was in March of 2013, and they found our program to be proficient and ready to address the increase of oil and gas operations in Pennsylvania, specifically praising our hydraulic fracturing and well construction regulations that are designed to protect fresh groundwater."

Abruzzo actually said DePasquale's audit - despite differences over the methodology and some of the conclusions - in fact "validates" DEP's performance.

DePasquale himself went out of his way to commend Abruzzo and all the staff at DEP for their cooperation, commitment and hard work.

Of the 29 recommendations DePasquale's team had for improving operations at DEP, the agency disagreed with only seven. Many, they noted have already been put into effect.

DePasquale is a former deputy secretary at DEP, and one senses in his audit's focus on inadequate computer systems and improvements to transparency and public responsiveness an insider's eye.

Of the agency's "eFACTS" website, DePasquale said, "It's kind of like the Schuylkill expressway: it was out-of-date the day it was built... It's just horrible."

The audit found 25 percent of the inspection reports publicly available on eFACTS contained errors and 76 percent did not have the inspector's comments fully listed.

DePasquale's audit is largely one of DEP's pro-active transparency and responsiveness to citizen, and to that extent it's useful, and for the most part the folks at DEP agree.

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